Ok, here’s one I recently wrote on the FoxNews site about the Second Amendment and gun registration/licensing.

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We don’t have to register to exercise our free speech (unless we’re conservatives on a liberal college campus). We don’t have to register or be licensed to enjoy freedom of religion, nor freedom of peaceful assembly.

I postulate that speech has killed more people than private citizen’s guns. How many people did Hitler kill, himself, I mean? How many times did he pull the trigger and take a life? No record on if he ever did it in WWI, and as far as we know, he only ever pulled the trigger on one person – himself. Yet he used words, speech, to create hatred for millions of people and gave orders, which are words, to exterminate over 6 million people who had no guns to defend themselves from his words. Sticks and stones may indeed break bones but words can cause a Holocaust.

If the pen indeed be mightier than the sword, then maybe we should start registering pens and speech, forcing practitioners of free speech whether verbally or in writing to comply with odious licensing procedures and taking away the pen and speech whenever someone waves a “red flag”. I bet you’d see CNN and MSNBC howl then.

In my first post on this subject I addressed the necessity of protecting traditional Christians from being harassed by the LGBTQ mafia. After taking care of that problem, the next freedom of speech issue that needs to be handled is the gatekeeping that the social media companies have been doing that denies access to people of whose politics the gatekeepers do not approve. Either single-handedly or by forming a cartel, companies such as Youtube, Twitter and Facebook have the ability to effectively shut out of the electronic town square anyone that they disapprove of. In the modern age these social media sites are de facto, the only means of free speech in the digital world. And since they act as essentially monopolies they must be treated as such by the federal government.

Currently, Twitter will allow (exclusively) left leaning users to contact the left-leaning “Trust and Safety” Commissariat, to fink on someone they dislike and this will get the wheels in motion to eliminate this wrong thinker. The process may take one or several steps but the eventual outcome will be the removal of the offender from the Twitterverse. Facebook and Youtube have similar set-ups with equally Orwellian titles that allow the Left to exclude the Right from these social media sites. Since these sites benefit from the virtual monopolies that they have they must be regulated as such by the government to prevent them from discriminating against those they dislike.

On the commerce side there are money transfer services like PayPal and Stripe that also have formed cartel like arrangements that conspire to demonetize anyone whose politics they disapprove of. Added to this are the crowdfunding companies that have recently begun doing the same. And these sites are presently the critical locations for doing business on the web. Without them companies and individuals are shut out of e-commerce almost completely. The Left knows this and is using it as a bludgeon to force conformity by anyone who wants to do business on-line.

The good news is that laws already exist to combat this kind of market place manipulation. The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department are specifically empowered to monitor and enforce anti-trust and unfair trade practices laws. Currently the Justice Department is in the hands of the enemy and is probably incapable of performing its duty with respect to protecting the rights of non-leftist citizens. However, after the mid-terms it may well be that President Trump will be firing the Attorney General, his Deputy and every other swamp creature currently inhabiting it. If that does occur I hope one of the earlier actions of this cleansed department is investigating and punishing these various on-line perpetrators of malfeasance and leveling the playing field in the on-line environment.

It’s entirely possible that none of these issues would rise to the level of a Supreme Court case. But if it does we have the correct court to enforce these cases. With these cases covered I believe we will have provided the people on the right with the on-line environment they need to thrive. Otherwise these strong-arm tactics by the left will increasingly hamper and weaken us.

So many aspects of life under the leftist regime are unpleasant that sometimes it’s difficult to decide what should be fixed first. I think this is part of what leads to the apocalyptic mindset when the Right thinks of how all this will have to be resolved. Back in September the ZMan had a podcast that looked at the current state of the Bill of Rights in America. http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=14969

He makes a pretty compelling case that even though theoretically we still have freedoms of speech and religion and the right to bear arms all of these have been hamstrung through the efforts of courts, state governments, bureaucrats and even corporations that want to tell you how to live.

And that has been in the back of my mind ever since. And now that Brett Kavanaugh has been added to the Supreme Court I think it’s clear what the first priority should be. It’s time to restore the Bill of Rights. It’s time to take a stand against the Courts and States that have criminalized traditional beliefs and practices. And the most egregious example is the gay marriage bamboozle. It’s time for the Supreme Court to tell the Blue States that normal people don’t have to pretend that gay marriage is something they need to celebrate. We can leave the question of the constitutionality of protecting the right to gay marriage for another day but it’s obvious to any reasonable man that eschewing any involvement with it is squarely under the jurisdiction of the Freedom of Religion aspect of the First Amendment. Not being a lawyer, I’m not exactly sure what the best way to provide blanket protection for this. I would guess that a decision from the Supreme Court recognizing the tenets of traditional marriage as protected under the First Amendment should do it. Then if any of the states disobey the ruling the President can send the National Guard in and follow up with some kind of federal oversight to ensure that it sticks.

In addition to the cake bakers and photographers this will also aid the religious organizations, schools and social agencies. For instance, Catholic Adoption agencies have been put out of business because states like Massachusetts prosecuted them for refusing adoption to homosexuals. Now, it may already be too late for some organizations like the Boy Scouts. They seem to have folded. But new organizations can step forward to fill the gap. So, these protections will benefit many parts of traditional life. And in the aggregate, they will make life more tolerable for traditional individuals in America. In fact, what they will allow is the ability for normal people to separate from the progressives in the aspects of life that are most important to people, namely their most strongly held beliefs.

So, this is the first and most critically needed change that the Right needs enacted. There are plenty of other areas where push back against the progressives is needed and I will address these subsequently but without a doubt, this one is first.

Is John McCain alive or dead? If alive, can he vote? Which way would he vote? After all he does love to spoil things. Assuming he will not be a factor, is Susan Collins the weak link? If she is, can she be persuaded? Is she up for re-election? What other republican votes are question marks? Could Manchin from West Virginia be convinced to vote against his party? If we don’t have the votes how likely is it that the mid-terms will increase the Republican Senate Majority? Should we try now and then after the mid-terms?

These are a few of the question that would need to be answered before trying to figure out if and/or when a conservative justice could get through the Senate.

And the other big question is whether Roberts is a ringer. Does he need to be outvoted too? If that’s the case we’ll need Ginsberg to go too.

So, as with all things Washingtonian, there are wheels within wheels and waiting is an integral part of the game. But so far Trump has a pretty good track record of getting the luck. If he gets a good man in then we can hope to know the answer to some of the Roberts questions pretty quickly. And if Roberts does turn out to be a ringer that’ll be just one more reason to distrust all things Bush and celebrate dodging the JEB! bullet almost as much as the Hillary one.

So, my guess, McConnell will spend a little time doing his math and making sure he completely understands the dynamic. Now that he and President Trump have normalized their relationship I expect they’ll coordinate carefully on the when and the how. They may spring it pretty quickly when it’s time and not give the Media or the Dems a lot of time to screech. McConnell indicated the vote would be in the fall. Maybe that’s a ruse. Maybe they’ll surprise everyone and do it before Labor Day. I’m not an expert on the machinery of the Senate so I don’t know how likely that is. My guess is McCain may be an important piece of the puzzle. His wife is touted to be in line for the job when he dies. How this affects the vote is anybody’s guess but my bet is that she’s a lib. For that reason, they may not wait for her to be seated.

Okay, so that’s the horse race. Now, why is this so damn important? Well, because if Roberts isn’t a ringer and we get another Gorsuch or Alito then we will have the first conservative Supreme Court since before I was born. In fact, we haven’t had a truly conservative Supreme Court in over a hundred years. Can you imagine if SCOTUS decides that all the Constitutional mandates that the activists judges have discovered over the last fifty years (abortion, gay rights, gay marriage, affirmative action, federal encroachment on States’ Rights, assaults on the First and Second Amendments) are not? And instead throws these decisions back to the states to decide? That would be a revolution. It would mean that instead of one homogeneous culture there would be several. And that might be the beginning of a great unraveling. Or it might be the occasion for a rethinking of many policies that were thrust onto the people from above by an elite that thought it was the best and the brightest and therefore ought to prevail against the will of the people. In places like Texas, Utah and the Old South more conservative populations would be allowed to live the way they wanted without the federal government harassing and scolding them for their values. To my mind that would come very close to restoring America to its essential virtue, a place where you are free to live the way you want without the government constantly interfering. And that sounds more or less like heaven to me. So, here’s hoping the math works out. Let’s hope the final sum is a positive. I’m tired of negative.